“[A] deeply caring work. . .  An essential primer on the roots of police violence.”

-Publishers Weekly

“Ralph brings necessary light to the problem of police torture. A damning indictment of the senseless and seemingly unceasing violence committed by those charged with serving the public.”

-Kirkus Reviews

“By tracing the involvement of various officers and members of the Chicago community, Ralph does more than make suggestions for change. He makes a compelling argument against torturing people who have been apprehended, whether they are innocent or guilty. In doing so, Ralph builds an argument for human rights that extend to all people.”

-NewCity

“Humane hands of care molded The Torture Letters in striking contrast to the torturers and complicit powers those very hands exposed. Carefully conceptualized, carefully researched, and carefully written, Ralph reveals a tragic history of police torture in Chicago and a heroic struggle to secure justice for survivors. This book is indispensable.”

-Ibram X. Kendi, National Book Award-winning author of Stamped from the Beginning

“Devastatingly powerful, The Torture Letters is one of those extraordinary volumes whose contents are accessible to all readers. It is a necessary and important book that measures both the economic and, more importantly, human cost of police violence.”

-Henry Louis Gates, Jr., author of Stony the Road: Reconstruction, White Supremacy, and the Rise of Jim Crow

“This is one of the most important books on our country’s criminal legal system that I have ever read. Ralph shines a light on a part of the system that many have long refused to acknowledge and forces us to reckon with what has been done in our name. With this book Ralph has not only reasserted his status as one of our most rigorous researchers, but has further demonstrated that he is a brilliant writer, able to draw us into the lives of people across Chicago with compelling, empathetic prose. He has done all of us a great service by writing this book.”

-Clint Smith, author of Counting Descent

“A powerful and blunt reminder that regimes of torture persist not because of the exceptional depravity of a few but because of the passive complicity of many. In the tradition of Hannah Arendt, Ralph illustrates how unexceptional one need be to commit acts of great cruelty. At the same time, he honors those who have dedicated their lives to the radical acts of goodness that are necessary to undo tremendous harm committed be powerful people. Perhaps most importantly, with unabashed love and care, he invites us all to think critically about where we might find ourselves and how to fight the silences that create and maintain profoundly dehumanizing systems.”

-Eve L. Ewing, author of Ghosts in the Schoolyard: Racism and School Closings on Chicago’s South Side

“In this morally-urgent book, Ralph shines a critical light on acts that have too long remained in the shadows—acts of cruelty, lawlessness, and cover-up. Investigative reporting blends with essay writing and ethnography to reveal a history of torture committed by the Chicago Police Department over the last several decades. We meet the officers who committed heinous acts and the men who survived them; members of the force who tried to do the right thing and those who turned blind eye; and young people organizing against police violence in all its forms. This is a novel and necessary read.”

-Matthew Desmond, Pulitzer Prize-winning author of Evicted

“The Torture Letters is a brilliant, devastating and essential work. With a powerful narrative propulsion, Ralph unflinchingly confronts the history and present of police torture in American life, raising powerful questions about the nation we think we know, and its ideals of freedom, equality, due process, and justice. In the tradition of scholars like Michel Foucault and Frantz Fanon, who bridged critical theory, social criticism, and public intellectualism, something is revealed on these pages that can no longer be pushed aside. Ralph opens up the divergent meanings of being American, an identity which affords protection to some and sentences others to unearned and repeated brutality.”

-Imani Perry, author of Looking for Lorraine: The Radiant Life of Lorraine Hansberry

“As profound and luminous a book as I have read in years, in any genre, The Torture Letters calls us to an overdue reckoning with America’s long-lasting history of racial violence and invites us to rebuild our world around a deep moral truth: No one deserves to be tortured, not even black and brown people, not even guilty black and brown people. As Ralph writes, ‘Even the guilty have the right not to be electrocuted and raped; even the guilty have the right not to be suffocated and beaten within an inch of their lives.’”

-Danielle Allen, author of Cuz: The Life and Times of Michael A.

“’Who wants to read a book about torture?’ I thought when I first confronted The Torture Letters. But from the very first paragraph I couldn’t stop. Ralph uses his remarkable eyes, ears, mind, and heart as a prism onto human experience, allowing us to see affect, memory, structure, contingency, and possibility all at once. By writing letters he refuses the social scientist’s phony perch of objectivity, choosing instead to expose the injustice and injuries that have been American democracy’s most open and visible secret. These letters bring to bear the eloquence of truth. There is no looking away, no skipping ahead, no openings for titillation. Because we are not bystanders or voyeurs but accomplices in the legitimization of state violence as security. No more. Who needs to read this book about torture? Everyone.”

-Robin D. G. Kelley, author of Freedom Dreams: The Black Radical Imagination

“Infuriating, compassionate, and accessible, this book is a meditation on torture told through a series of letters. In The Torture Letters, Ralph searingly explores the costs of police violence to individuals and society while making sure to also center community resistance. It would be easy for a book about torture to be relentlessly harsh but there is hope to be found in the Torture Letters. That hope is in the people who refuse to be terrorized and silenced by brutality and violence.”

-Mariame Kaba, founder & director of Project NIA

“The Torture Letters provides vivid moral clarity against the tide of cynicism that comes from being in a society awash with visual images of police abuse and violence. Ralph’s lucid prose, organized through a series of open letters, masterfully engages the emotional, ethical, and human dilemmas that are at stake in matters of state sanctioned violence—from the Chicago Police Department to the United States government in Guantanamo Bay. The haunting evoked by this beautifully written book is augmented by the heroism of the ordinary people through whose courage, the awesome power of the state is exposed for all to see. Ralph has made an essential intervention in scholarship on race, police, power, and the state.”

-Keeanga-Yamahtta Taylor, editor of How We Get Free: Black Feminism and the Combahee River Collective